Children find rotting corpse of 5-year-old missing girl

JAKARTA (JP): While playing in an empty house in Kerawang, West Java, two nine-year-old children received a shock on Saturday morning when they found a large black bag containing the gagged and strangled corpse of a five-year-old girl.

The morgue at Cipto Mangunkusumo General Hospital, which received the body, identified the victim as ADN, 5, a girl who had been reported missing by her parents over a month ago.

According to police, the nine-year-olds -- whose identities police have not revealed -- found the bag in the bathroom of the empty house on Jl. Gurame in the Puri Kosambi housing complex, in the village of Duren in Klari, Kerawang.

The children thought that the bag contained treasure or something like that. When they opened the bag, a rotting smell overpowered them. They were afraid and immediately ran to inform local residents, a police official of the City Police public service center, who requested anonymity, told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.

One of the local residents recognized the corpse as a girl named ADN, whom he said had gone missing for a month. ADN's mother, Maesaroh, was immediately notified by local residents, to visit the empty house and identify the girl.

Upon seeing the corpse, the official said, Maesaroh noticed that the girl "was in the exact same skirt. The entire outfit was the same as the one she wore on the day she had gone missing."

"That day, her mother had told her to go and buy meatballs. Since then, she had been missing," the official said, adding that after seeing the condition of her daughter's corpse, the mother fainted.

Five-year-old ADN, the official said, was found with a tight wire and a blue plastic rope around her neck and her mouth gagged with a handkerchief. Her panties were missing.

Before transferring her to Cipto Mangunkusumo General Hospital, local residents had first taken her to a hospital in Kerawang, where the body was treated with oil to mask the strong stench.

"Police are investigating the possibility that this girl could have been raped," the official said. (ylt)